I love documentaries. You see, I have this insatiable appetite for more knowledge about how the world works. Always have done.

On this thread rather than saying I want to watch documentaries about a specific subject matter, I want to throw it out to you guys to come up with links to documentaries which you think are most worthy of watching and learning from.

Anything you like, it's completely up to you. Of course, if you wish to pass commentary on any one documentary posted up - please do so. The more real discussion about key issues which affect all of us, the better.

First up...

ZeitgeistThe Movie (2007)

Directed and Produced by
Peter Joseph

Zeitgeist, produced by Peter Joseph, was created as a nonprofit expression to inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective and to understand that very often things are not what the population at large think they are...

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Re: Hard Hitting Documentaries

This is not really a documentary. It's Art Bell, from coast to coast interviewing John E Mack.
For those of you that have never heard of him:

John Edward Mack, M.D. (October 4, 1929–September 27, 2004) was an American psychiatrist, writer, and professor at Harvard Medical School. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, and a leading authority on the spiritual or transformational effects of alleged alien abduction experiences.

This is not really a documentary. It's Art Bell, from coast to coast interviewing John E Mack.
For those of you that have never heard of him:

John Edward Mack, M.D. (October 4, 1929–September 27, 2004) was an American psychiatrist, writer, and professor at Harvard Medical School. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, and a leading authority on the spiritual or transformational effects of alleged alien abduction experiences.

Cheers Bravo that is right up my street mate, now this guy I totally disagreed with his ramblings about UFO's but he makes up for it here in my opinion, he puts the information over well and it makes you think...

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of The World by Niall Ferguson

Quote:

Ep. 1: Dreams of avarice
From Shylock's pound of flesh to the loan sharks of Glasgow, from the "promises to pay" on Babylonian clay tablets to the Medici banking system. Professor Ferguson explains the origins of credit and debt and why credit networks are indispensable to any civilization.

Ep. 2: Human bondage
How did finance become the realm of the masters of the universe? Through the rise of the bond market in Renaissance Italy. With the advent of bonds, war finance was transformed and spread to north-west Europe and across the Atlantic. It was the bond market that made the Rothschilds the richest and most powerful family of the 19th century.

Ep. 3: Blowing bubbles
Why do stock markets produce bubbles and busts? Professor Ferguson goes back to the origins of the joint stock company in Amsterdam and Paris. He draws telling parallels between the current stock market crash and the 18th century Mississippi Bubble of Scottish financier John Law and the 2001 Enron bankruptcy. He shows why humans have a herd instinct when it comes to investment, and why no one can accurately predict when the bulls might stampede.

Ep. 4: Risky business
Life is a risky business -- which is why people take out insurance. But faced with an unexpected disaster, the state has to step in. Professor Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can't provide some of the adequate protection against catastrophe. His quest for an answer takes him to the origins of modern insurance in the early 19th century and to the birth of the welfare state in post-war Japan.

Ep. 5: Safe as houses
It sounded so simple: give state-owned assets to the people. After all, what better foundation for a property-owning democracy than a campaign of privatisation encompassing housing? An economic theory says that markets can't function without mortgages, because it's only by borrowing against their assets that entrepreneurs can get their businesses off the ground. But what if mortgages are bundled together and sold off to the highest bidder?

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it's the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What's more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history.